by Lynn Red
I had to laugh. “Guilty,” I snorted. “Anyway, this is...this is kind of wild. What the hell...I mean who buys bootlegged liquor?”
“Lotsa folks,” Jasper cut in. Mostly these lounges and bars and hillbilly gawddam bottle shops up in the mountains. This stuff’s stonger’n anything you can buy at a normal store, and costs half so much since ain’t no sin tax laid on it, d’ya see?”
I shook my head. “That’s incredible. I’m in the middle of a 21st century bootlegger war. How in the hell do I find my way into these situations? How the hell do I get myself out of them? Hell, I can’t even imagine where I am, or what I’m—”
“Dangerous path, Ami,” Nana Singer said. “Don’t let your mind take over, or your heart won’t know how to survive.”
It was irritating to be cut off like that, sure, but the truth of what she said was undeniable. I was doing that thing where I bury myself in my own brain and refuse to climb out until I’ve thought up every single horrible possible outcome that could exist. I’d never escape from the woods; I’d never get back to my normal life; everyone who ever knew me will forget I exist and I’ll never get that dog I always wanted and—
“Ami,” Nana Singer had begun poking me in the knee with her bare toes. “You’re getting very loopy-looking. Maybe not so much of the bottle?”
I shook my head vehemently and cleared my throat. “It isn’t that,” I whispered. “I just keep thinking about all the things I can’t find, and all the answers I won’t get. I keep thinking about the life I’ve apparently abandoned, and I can’t do much of anything to fix it. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, and the tiny clues I get here and there isn’t gonna cut it for long.”
Jasper didn’t take his eyes off me, he just leaned forward, grabbed the bottle and took a nip. “You can’t keep her here and not tell her the truth, Ale.” His voice and diction was astonishingly clear, which I had come not to expect at all. “Jes’ ain’t right a’tall,” he said, “ain’t right a’tall.” That was a lot better, a lot more what I thought I would hear out of the wild-looking mountain bear that I’d become oddly enamored with in the past half-hour or so.
The giant bear who I’d kissed a few moments before stood up and let out a long, low grumble that vibrated in my belly. Something about his voice struck me in a way that nothing I’d ever heard had ever hit. He put a burning hot hand on my shoulder, then walked around behind the rickety sofa where I was sitting, and laid the other one on me. He squeezed gently, which had an almost magical muscle-relaxing effect, and then he took a long, deep breath.
Ale held it for a few moments, and then let it out in another long, loud sigh. “You’re right, Jas,” he said a second later. “You’re right. But is this really the time? I mean we’ve got panthers coming down on our throats and if we—”
I stood up and made for the door. I really don’t know what I was doing, if I’m being totally honest. I really don’t know what I’d do if he let me get to the door without saying anything, but I also knew that I couldn’t just sit there and keep living this bizarre fantasy without any answers. It had gone on too long with me just sort of going along for the ride, and I couldn’t take any more of it.
“Wait,” Ale said softly as I reached the door. “Just wait a second. “You can’t walk out.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “And why is that? Why can’t I just walk out? Aside from the fact that I have no idea where I am, no friends, no phone, no car, not a goddamn thing in the world. Oh, and then there’s the fact that you took me into the woods after some car wreck that I still don’t understand.” I closed my eyes and smiled grimly. “I don’t want to leave, Ale, you know that. But if I don’t get some answers, I have to leave, or I’m as weak as I could be.”
“She got ‘erself a point,” Jasper said, though he pronounced ‘point’ as ‘purnt,’ which was a funny little accent note that I remember from one of my uncles who moved to New Jersey when he was eighteen and came home using the turlit and hearing pigs go ‘ernk.’
I couldn’t help smiling, but the laugh died on my lips.
“He’s right, Ale,” Nana Singer said. “It’s gone on too long. I thought we might be able to escape without this going so far, but...well, that’s obviously not the case.”
To emphasize her words, the wind outside the rickety little cabin whipped viciously through the boards, chilling me to the bone. The wind carried with it a chorus of howls that made my stomach churn inside me. Ale reached over and grabbed one of my shoulders as Jasper took another drink.
“Okay,” Ale said, “here goes. The panthers killed my father, that much you know because I told you.”
“Well I sort of guessed,” I said under my breath.
“Right okay, well they killed him, and then a war started. That was twelve years ago, and nothing much has changed since. They kill one of us, we kill eight of them. The numbers still don’t work out though, because there’s a shit ton of them, and only about a hundred of us. So, you do the math.”
The howls kept going, whipping into what sounded like a terrible frenzy. I clutched my arms around my chest, shivering. Not even Ale’s warm skin helped. I couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering. The distinct feeling of bile rising in my throat taunted me, but swallowing didn’t help.
“And the cops?” I asked, “how do they figure into all this? Why would they help a bunch of panthers?” Ale shrugged, but Jasper stood, shakily, to his feet and leaned against the giant bear’s shoulder. “I can prolly field this ‘un. After all, ain’t like they been doin’ it forever. This shit’s all new. Or newish, I s’pose you could say.”
A pursed look of concern slipped across Nana singer’s face. For a moment, it seemed like she was going to stop him speaking, but instead, she forced her face to return to its standard serenity. She even managed a thin-lipped smile before letting her shoulders sag. She looked for that moment, slightly pitiful. Her age showed for the first time. Now, don’t get me wrong, she never looked young, but she did look strong. Now, though, she was withered. Wary and weary, her eyes seemed hollow and her cheeks gaunt. But still she forced herself to smile, though her right eye twitched slightly.
She coughed. The sound rattled through her frail body until she managed to calm herself.
“Jasper,” she wheezed slightly, “not much time. Tell your story and we need to get out of here. There’s nothing more we can do, not now, and not here.”
“Right,” he said, his voice shaking just as hers. There was something between these two, even someone as generally dumbfounded about spotting love as me could tell. It was different than standard, generally uninteresting romance though; I could tell these two had shared a lifetime or more. “Right, the story. Well young’un, there’s a lot I could tell ya and a lot I could trouble ya with, but if’n I do alla that you’re just gonna end up confused and we’re gonna end up dead.” Outdoor howls grew nearer. My skin crawled and my stomach turned. I didn’t want to be any part of this. I wanted to go back to the relatively simple life I had before.
At least, I did until I turned to Ale and saw him staring into my soul. Those dark blue eyes, flecked with twinkling gold, relaxed me enough to get my wits back under control. He didn’t smile. There was nothing to smile about. Instead he gave me a strong, solid look that radiated strength and determination. “Tell her, Jas,” he finally said without taking his eyes off mine. “She’s one of us now, even if she isn’t really one of us. “But make it quick.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure’n I will. Short version is that after Ale’s pops died, everything went nuts.”
“Explain nuts,” I said.
He shook his head sadly. “Just chaos. Everything he worked for—the peace, an’ all that—just up an’ vanished. Most important thing though is that the pact keepin’ us all from fiddlin’ around in the human world went right to shit.”
“The panthers ignored it?” I asked.
“Mhm,” he said in his curious drawl. “Thing about ‘em is they can sorta.
..mess with human’s minds. Make ‘em believe things to be true that ain’t. Kinda like they cloud people’s minds, make ‘em act funny.”
“My God,” I whispered. “So that guy in the hospital, he was—”
“Cloudin’ up brains,” Jasper said.
The way he explained it made me laugh nervously under my breath. “But then why’d he disappear right before all that bullshit with the car wrecks started piling up?”
Jasper let out a long, low whistle. “Thing is, it’s hard to say exactly. But I’m guessin’ the police weren’t so keen on helpin’ you out?”
“They were trying to take me hostage,” Ale said with a grunt. “It didn’t make sense for the longest time, but now that I start connecting the dots in my brain, here we are. The panthers—or rather, their leader—had done some kind of mind trick to convince them that I needed to be held on to. I’ll never understand how they do it, but its—”
“That’s Jedi mind trick shit,” I said with a flat voice. “They’re brainwashing people and convincing them of what they want them to do.”
“It’s worse than that,” Ale said. “They’re in the bureaucracy. They were talking in somebody’s ear. Hell, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if these goddamn cats managed to get into the upper echelons of the department. God, can you imagine what a nightmare that’ll be to try and deal with?”
All I could do was shake my head in a mixture of amazement and utter, complete horror. What in the hell were we supposed to do if these creatures could cloud people’s minds? How the hell are you supposed to fight something that can become anything, that can infiltrate anything?
“Could they mess with, you know, a whole bunch of people at once?” I asked. “I mean, if there are enough of them, can they maybe control, you know, an army?”
Jasper laughed to himself. “Well,” he started, and then trailed off for a moment. “I suppose...I mean, there ain’t no particular reason that they couldn’t. All’s I know is that in the past, they never been smart enough, ain’t never been clever enough, but...”
“Exile’s different,” Ale cut in. “We all know that. He doesn’t have the same, let’s call it, the same limitations the rest of them do. His ten years on the run must’ve taught him things he never learned. His decade long vacation probably put him into all sorts of circumstances that he learned from, grew from, and probably became a whole lot more dangerous from.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I mean, it’s not the same thing, but one time, when I—well anyway, my life was shitty and I just took off. I only split for about a year, but I spent a lot of it living on the streets, living without enough food, without any real way to get to other places. I can tell you that, yeah, I learned a whole goddamn lot. I can imagine what he’d pick up after a decade.” I fell silent, chewing on my bottom lip to keep from yammering any more. The last thing anyone needed was more blabbering from me. At least, that’s the last thing -I- needed, anyway. I can only imagine what the others thought.
“It’s a crazy thing,” Ale finally said as the wind whipped up brutally outside, and a trickle of dust wormed its way through the planks in the wall. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. We need to get back to the clan, because right now there’s about four hundred panthers in between us and the rest of the bears. That’s what we have to do. And we’d all be better off if we kept our minds on that instead of on far-flung shit about some wild mind control schemes or anything like that.”
I took a deep breath, wondering what the hell was about to happen to me, and what the hell was about to happen to all these people who had somehow, impossibly, become my friends in the last stretch of time without any particular reason for it. There wasn’t anything I could do anything about what was coming. That’s what really got me, you know? There was just nothing I could do. And if you find a nurse who can’t do anything about a situation, you just found a really, really uncomfortable nurse.
“So do we fight?” I heard myself asking. It was like a hollow echo inside my chest. I hated the way I felt, but I also couldn’t figure out anything else to do. “And if we do, then what the hell are we waiting for?”
12
Ah, there is pretty much nothing in the world I like better than the smell in the air after a thunderstorm. So clean, peaceful, tranquil and soft.
Then again, I also really love the way the air smells after you pop off a handful of pistol rounds: acrid, ashen and again, oddly calming and soothing. What can I say? I’m a woman of many tastes and desires. Tonight, though, I got both of them. As we emerged from the cabin, Jasper and Ale ready to shift at a moment’s notice. As far as me, I had my pistol, and I had three boxes of bullets emptied into the pockets of a jacket we’d luckily found in the rickety old cabin.
It was this ancient green, army style jacket with little rips all up and down the arms and sides. Some kind of patchwork kept the stuff on the forearms from falling completely apart, and the name on the patch—and the patch itself—was long since gone. It was heavy, thick and warm, and that’s all I needed. Past that, it had about four million pockets all over the inside, most of which I thought were probably aftermarket, into which I could stuff all the shit I wanted to carry.
Like I said, what I wanted to carry was as many bullets as I could manage, and that was really about the long and short of it. I couldn’t tell you how many I had stuffed into my pockets, but if panthers got hurt by bullets, then by God I was going to put the hurt to as many of them as humanly possible.
Then again, something was niggling at the back of my mind. I couldn’t really be sure I hadn’t fallen in with the wrong crowd. Doing that had been a fixture of my life since I was about ten years old. I had no idea why it struck right then, but my old self-doubt poked its head through the surface, and it couldn’t have possibly had any worse timing. It chewed my guts and before I knew what was going on, that feeling of delicious confidence had melted straight away into a grotesque feeling of my stomach turning in on itself. Look, I’m no stranger to anxious nausea. Hell, I remember right before I took my nursing boards, I had to sit there and meditate in the room for a half hour before I could pick up a pencil.
This, though, was different. This was...dangerous, and it had dangerous timing. If I couldn’t manage to keep it together now, I wasn’t the only one who was going to eat dirt, I had the terrible feeling we all would.
“How do I know I’m on the right side?” I asked Ale as soon as I could get him alone enough to not worry about the other two overhearing.
Without pausing for a second, the answer came. “Nana Singer told you how to find your answers,” Ale’s jaw clenched tight. Every time he squeezed his teeth together, the muscles in his jaw and the cords in his neck stood out. “Stop thinking so goddamn much. All that does is get you mixed up. Listen to your heart. Listen to your intuition. If you think you’re in the wrong place, then you are. If you think that somehow, I’ve been putting you on this whole time, and putting all this effort into convincing you not to leave, then I want you to do what you feel is right.”
He started to breathe heavily then, his chest rising and falling with every single inhale and exhale. Sweat ran down the sides of Ale’s face, though it was cold outside and even in the cabin. Past that, the wind whipping through the woods cooled every drop of perspiration that formed on my forehead.
Ale started toward the door, but before he made it there, turned and faced me again. “I won’t make you do anything,” he whispered. “But you already know that. I’m not going to force you to do a single thing you don’t want to do. If it’s what you want, I’ll take you right back to that intersection in front of the hospital and you never have to think of me again. But, there’s one problem.”
“We have to get there first?” I asked with a slight grin crossing my lips.
“That’d be the problem.” He said. “So at least for now, there’s only one thing we can do.”
I nodded. I don’t know what I was thinking, if I’m being honest. I don’t’ kno
w if I wanted to leave or stay, but I knew he was right. Before I could make that decision, we had to get out of these woods alive, and I’ll be damned if I was going to fail the people who had saved me so many times.
*
It didn’t take long before we were doing what had to be done.
The small of fur and sweat and oddly, of fire, encapsulated us as soon as we were out of the cabin. It was almost sickening how thickly the air surrounded me and I could hardly keep myself from retching until I grew used to it. To say I was scared isn’t the right word.
Scared is what I was when I was taking my nursing boards. Scared is what I was when my dad was dying, and I wasn’t sure what the world was going to be like when I was alone in it without my daddy to go to when it got to be too much.
Now? I wasn’t scared.
I was angry, I was a little confused, and honestly, I was more than a little ready to just get it the hell over with. Jasper was half transformed, his fur-covered arms thicker than any I’d ever seen. Ale of course was gigantic, muscled like a gigantic demon and ready to rock. And by ready to rock, what I mean is, he was just about ready to rip something’s throat out if it meant we got to safety. Or, you know, if it meant he got to rip the throat out of a panther.
The whole place had that same smell. The smell of possibility, the smell of danger...the smell of, well, now that I recognized it, the smell of burning pine leaves that I always figured meant I was having a stroke if I heard when no one else did.
The entire world smelled like pine trees that had caught fire and were dripping with sooty smoke. I’d never smelled anything like it in my life, but Ale and Jasper didn’t react much at all after a couple of disgusted sniffs. Nana Singer, who was in between the bears and myself, had her head cocked to the side and was paying very intent attention to something I couldn’t sense.